"We purchased Aquarius this year (only a couple more
to go before we have them all) and played it for the first time
yesterday with some friends. Aquarius is one of our two favorite
games from Gen Con this year. The game is a riot and a great
game to socialize with! Great job! Now, what are you going to
do top that one?" -- Email from Dan M. of
San Francisco

The
new Fluxx decks are here! The new Fluxx decks are here! For nearly
as long as we've been selling Fluxx, we've been talking about
making foreign language editions, in particular for Germany (the
country with the world's most active market for card-and-board
games). Finally, after much talk and many false starts, German
Fluxx has arrived!

Fans of the original Fluxx may be surprised, even alarmed,
at the artistic differences between the two editions. As you
can see from the card samples below, the German cards have a
very different style from the traditional look of the Fluxx deck.
When we agreed to license the German publication rights to Amigo
Spiele, we also decided to give them the freedom to produce the
German version in the manner they thought best for their market,
and this is what they came up with.

But once you get used to it, I think you'll find their version
has a lot of appeal. I love the color artwork for the Keeper
(or should I say, Motiv) cards, created by Barbara Spelger, and
check out how the circles in the corners contain iconic version
of those images. Isn't it great how they then use those icons,
in pairs, on the Ziel (Goal) cards?

Because
of the way text plumps when you translate it into German (on
average, a paragraph auf Deutsch is 30% longer than the same
material in English) they decided to leave off all that standard
text we put on every card, and even some other fine print, putting
all that info onto the large, fold-out instruction sheet. But
I respect that choice... it certainly makes for more attractive
cards. In particular, notice how simple the Basic Rules (GrundRegel)
card has become (that's it on the front of the box). Notice how
this new design will allow you to play the 4 most common rule-types
onto the corners of the Basic Rules!

Of course, the downside of all this fine German re-engineering
is that all the text is written in another language. I have the
serendipitous advantage of having studied said language for 3
years in high school, but that really just means my guesses are
better than average. What's cool though is that you can figure
out what most cards are/do easily enough, if you know regular
Fluxx. The tricky ones are the Aktions... some are pretty easy
to decode, but others misleading. ("Eine Karte Für
Mich", for example, which translates to One Card For Me,
is actually a card we call "Go Fish.") The first thing
we had to do, therefore, was to write out a little translation
lookup chart, so that everyone could figure out what everything
did, and then we played! And while it's really rather odd, it's
also really cool.

Yes, they did change the cardback... however, the cards themselves
are the same size (with the exact same corner radius) as the
Fluxx 3.0 cards,
so you can shuffle the two types together if you want.

It
should be noted that this is a fully authorized and licensed
publication, and that we worked with Amigo throughout their re-design,
approving everything as we went along. Also, while the visual
presentation of the game is quite different, the gameplay hasn't
been changed at all. It's a straight translation of Fluxx 3.0,
with the addition of 6 extra cards (since their standard box
holds a slightly bigger deck than ours), namely a trio of cards
they wanted to bring back from Version 2 (Government Cover-up,
Secret Data, and Security Breach) plus 3 Blanxx (in a novel,
even more generic style than our Blanxx). So overall, I'm really
very happy with it!

Fans in Germany will hopefully find Fluxx auf Deutsch wherever
Amigo games are sold... our more local fans will need to be a
little more patient. So far we've only received a box of sample
decks, but we've requested a wholesale-sized shipment of decks,
so that we can offer them direct to our fans through our online
Shopping Center.

So good luck, German Fluxx! Here's hoping you sell a million
copies and win Spiel Des Jahres!

I also mentioned
some new part-time help. We've very pleased to announce that
we've recently hired not just one, but several new 10-hour-a-week
helpers. This week it was Fuzzface, our new System Administor,
and before that it was Margit, who is helping Kristin with book-keeping.
Also, in the tele-commuting world, we're now getting help from
Russell Grieshop, our new Rabbit Coordinator, and Ali Summers,
a Sales Guru who'll be helping us build up a system to enable
freelance sales reps to work for us on commission. You can read
all about these fine folks and the others on Staff here at LooneyLabs
by checking out the newly updated Who's
Who? page.

Needless to say, we're really pleased and excited to have
all this extra help. Our company has reached the stage where
there's way too much work, in way too many departments, for us
to accomplish ourselves, yet we still struggle with cashflow
issues and can't afford to hire all the help we might like. By
hiring several different part-time workers, we can delegate many
of these tasks to different people. So far, this is working great
(though it does get a bit intense around here when they all show
up to work on the same day), and Kristin is really psyched to
be getting the help she so desperately needs.

Once again, I'd just like to say Thank You to everyone who's
helping us build this dream of ours, both (under)paid and un-paid.
You-all rock! We couldn't succeed without your support!

Have
a Great Week!

"The coolest thing about the
spaceship (other than having an "open-air" deck), was
that Andy Looney was there, with the two little girls who were
with him at Origins. I got to apologize to him in person for
not keeping touch over email." [Then the spaceship turned
into a school, and a test was being missed...] "I wish Andy
Looney was my dad. He was so cool to talk to in person." -- description of a dream in Laura
Marsh's blog, from the entry dated Aug.
7th, 2003

"In total, based on all the data from the
research and the testimony heard regarding the effects and consequences
of cannabis use, the committee concludes that the state of knowledge
supports the belief that, for the vast majority of recreational
users, cannabis use presents no harmful consequences for physical,
psychological or social well-being in either the short or the
long term." -- Canadian
Senate Report on Marijuana Policy, Volume One, circa 2002,
page 165

"How in God's name should one
then devote oneself to a party which aims to abandon the poor
to their poverty, cut school lunch programs, cut foreign aid,
keep out immigrants, deny government assistance to legal and
tax-paying immigrants, cut medical aid to the poor and the sick,
and put more people in prison than any other industrial democracy?
This is why I say the pro-life activist who gets into bed with
the Republicans is compromised. He thinks he has stood firm on
abortion (we'll get back to that), but he has completely compromised
on justice." -- Mark Rosenfelder, "Have
Evangelicals Sold Their Souls To The Devil?"